Oftentimes, a content management system for presenting information on web pages uses various separate documents to blend content with markup indicators (“tags”) for displaying the content. A markup language, such as hypertext markup language (HTML), creates a web page document that specifies particular visual structures to be populated with the content, which may reside in separate content resource documents on remote databases. A style sheet is yet another document or document fragment that allows attributes and layouts for web page formatting accomplished by each tag in one or more web page documents to be specified globally in one centralized location—i.e., the style sheet. A conventional web page template is yet another kind of document that may contain variables wherein static links to various resources can be substituted for the variables by a web designer in an attempt to outfit a “canned” web page design with new content.
Conventionally, to create and/or edit a web page document, associated content stored in a database, and an associate style sheet may require a web page designer (who may also need significant programming skill) to switch between editors and documents to make changes in the various documents and data sources. For example, content in the form of a database-driven extensible markup language (XML) document, can be marked up via a style sheet, but the process is somewhat awkward and requires multiple steps. To create a web page table, for example, four steps might be needed: first, content elements, such as the strings “James” and “Brian” are retrieved from an XML repository, such as a remote database:
<root>   <employee>James</employee>   <employee>Brian</employee></root>.
Secondly, an XML style sheet is developed to render an XML document of the format above, into a presentable HTML document:
<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?><xsl:stylesheet>   <xsl:output method=“xml” version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”   indent=“yes”/>   <xsl:template match=“root”>      <table class=“normal” cellpadding=“1”      cellspacing=“1” border=“0” width=“100%”>         <tr style=“background-color:#9ccfff;color:black”>            <td class=“normal”>employee</td>         </tr>         <xsl:for-each select=“employee”>            <tr>               <td>                  <xsl:value-of select=“.”/>               </td>            </tr>         </xsl:for-each>      </table>   </xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>
Thirdly, processes using DHTML (“dynamic-HTML”) and script associated with a web page document may use an XML parser to transform the XML document using the style sheet. (DHTML has behavior components that encapsulate specific functionality or behavior on a page. These “behaviors” can isolate script from content, resulting in cleaner web page documents.)
Fourthly, the desired table is displayed by the browser, showing the result of the above transform.
A conventional method, such as that described above, presents several problems. First, the conventional method may be limited to a relatively elite set of web page developers skilled in making the above-mentioned transformation, for instance via extensible style sheet language transformations (XSLT).
It may also be difficult to transform the content, in one type of data structure or language, into that of the markup language, if the two are not compliant. Regarding the example above, XHTML is a family of current and future document types and modules that are designed to work in conjunction with XML-based user agents, but if the data content is not XHTML compliant then it is difficult to display the content as HTML in the output.
As indicated, the conventional method does not provide a web designer working on the web page document an integrated means for editing XML data that resides in a database remote from the web page document and does not provide for persisting changes in the XML data back to the remote database. In fact, in order to update the result of the transformation using new data, the entire XML document must be re-transformed using the style sheet and, to see how the update looks in real time, the entire resulting HTML tree must be re-interpreted by a browser, seriously lowering performance, and possibly making certain complex style sheets infeasible.